About Soccer Analytics
While there is a lot of soccer analytics work out there, there is precious little in the way of objective, third-party writing on the subject. You know, the meta stuff. That’s where the Soccer Analytics newsletter comes in. I’ve been writing about soccer for a living for more than a decade, and much of that has been spent tracking the growth and progress of the soccer analytics movement—and not necessarily from the perspective of a booster, or a critic, either. That’s the goal of this newsletter. If you’re interested:
What some nice analysts have said about stuff I write here:
What do you get by subscribing?
In addition to a free weekly post, you’ll get one or two ‘extras’ a week, posts focusing on football analytics and financial esoterica that usually doesn’t make it in the papers. Plus, you get the value of having your assumptions about the utility of numbers in football challenged in a fun(ish) way. Nothing too technical here—I’m not a numbers man myself. I try to focus on the fuzzier, less well-known grey area of how clubs are ACTUALLY USING analytics.
Who are you, anyway?
My name is Richard Whittall. I’ve been writing about soccer/football since 2007. In 2011, I was hired to write full-time for theScore.com, a Canadian sports media site (and former cable channel). There, I wrote several analytics and tactics-based columns as a third-party observer, when few others were really covering the subject. Since then, my writing has appeared at the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Foreign Policy and more. I’ve also worked closely with a few boutique analytics firms, such as 21st Club, and have done consulting/writing work with one or two organizations.
